Instead of letting your mind wander throughout the day, spend a few minutes to really observe the things and people around you. It could be a customer waiting in the help desk area, a colleague planning out the roster, how people unbox your product or even how the files are organised at work.

Once you make it a habit to notice things and people, patterns will start to emerge. You’ll find loopholes, unnecessary steps, irrelevant rules, and a lot of things that don’t make sense or make it harder for people. It’ll soon become obvious that some problems are seriously dragging down your product or workplace.

One of the pillars of design thinking is empathy. You have to put yourself in the users’ shoes. Once you’ve identified a problem worth solving, try immersing yourself in the full experience. This helps you deep dive into the problem, seeing and feeling what the user does.

If you’re investigating why customers keep filing for refunds, order a few products and observe whether what was promised is what you get. If you’re wondering why many colleagues are complaining about the slow IT service, file a few issues yourself.

Don’t stop there. Get a few friends and colleagues to try it out too, if possible, and get their feedback. Because their perspective, behaviour and reaction will be different to yours. You’ll need to gather as many inputs as you can to gain a holistic look at the issue.

Sometimes, you need to challenge the conventional wisdom and the way things work. This is the crux of design thinking. Just because something is working, doesn’t mean it is working right or at its best.

You’ll need to reframe the problem to help you understand what the issue really is. Ask questions no one has thought of asking before. It’s easier to do this if you have immersed yourself in a problem and spoken to different people.

Maybe you’ll discover that the issue isn’t the product but the process itself, or vice versa. Or maybe you’ll realise that the team failed to understand human behaviour under certain circumstances. Either way, challenging the status quo will help generate a bunch of ideas.

Design thinking emphasises working together instead of in silos. The simplest thing you could do is to start talking to people you wouldn’t normally chat to at work. At times, the best ideas can come from people who aren’t part of the process and project or who don’t use the product at all. Your simple regular chats can turn into brainstorming sessions or new proposals, opening new doors for you at work and your career.

Iterative testing is another component of design thinking. If you’re considering a radical transformation, try breaking it down into small measurable adjustments. Testing small changes will give you a better idea on the next steps to take. Based on the user feedback, you can continue improving it until it is ready for production.

Furthermore, people are often nervous about big changes. If you’re trying to persuade management or the rest of the team to back up your idea, it’s much easier when you do it piece by piece and have solid data to back it up. And if you make a mistake, it’s easier and faster to correct it.

Finally, it’s okay to fail. This is perhaps the most important takeaway of the design thinking approach. Failures give you clear signals towards the path to success. It’s okay if your idea is bad, or you bit off more risk than you could chew. If you’re not making the same mistakes, you’re fine. Embrace trying and failing.